August 24, 2012

Kansas City GSA Employee Works From Home -- In Hawaii

Kansas City, Missouri (CNN) -- The General Services Administration, already under investigation for lavish spending, allowed an employee to telecommute from Hawaii even though he is based at the GSA's Kansas City, Missouri, office, a CNN investigation has found.

It cost more than $24,000 for the business development specialist to travel to and from the mainland United States over the past year.

He is among several hundred GSA "virtual" workers who also travel to various conferences and their home offices, costing the agency millions of dollars over the past three years[...]

And a GSA employee in Kansas City, who requested anonymity, said that hiring someone in Hawaii to work for the Kansas City region was ludicrous.

"It doesn't make sense," the employee said. "When you consider everything you need when you hire someone, it would have been better to look for someone in the Kansas City area. It would have reduced the cost of travel by at least 70 percent when you look at just the airfare of what it takes to from Honolulu to Washington, D.C., where a lot of business is done.